


Something More Than Tender

by louciferish



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sleeping Beauty Fusion, Colonialism, Fairy Tale Retellings, M/M, Magic, Prince Victor Nikiforov, chihohohoko2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 03:49:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17338043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louciferish/pseuds/louciferish
Summary: Like most children, Victor first heard the story from his mother - the prince, beautiful but doomed, who fell into a magical sleep and took his entire kingdom down too.It was meant to be one of those many stories about morality - love, respect, strength, all the traits that a young prince might need to learn if he was to grow into a well-loved ruler, but Victor's imagination flew over the message, rushing onward to magic, mystery, and a Prince, like him but frozen, trapped in a thousand-year sleep.





	Something More Than Tender

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilithiumwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithiumwords/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Ren!
> 
> I was more than a little :o when I saw I drew your name. WHOW. But then, looking at your list, I knew what I was going to go for right away. I hope it's to your liking, and that you have an awesome 2019!

_Once, in a time long passed but not forgotten, there was a powerful kingdom surrounded by an enchanted wood._

_Its citizens were content, safe, and happy. They had wealth and power and a great army to protect them from harm. For generations, the ruling family had acted as parents to all the land - loving, protective, possessive. From the walls of their castle, they looked out, and where they saw suffering, they sought to end it._

_From their own kingdom, they spread like moss, creeping fingers into the ruins of other sovereigns and scooping up what they found. It began as a campaign of support and aid. It ended as conquest._

_Soon, the kingdom had swallowed up all the nearby lands, and they did not stop there. They moved further afield, bolstering their own seat of power on the backs of other cultures. Their soldiers ran wild in far-off places, the rescuers transformed into oppressors._

_Into this time, a prince was born._

_To celebrate the occasion, the King and Queen issued a mandate, directing that all their subjects journey to the castle to pay tribute to the new child, though he was not their heir._

_And so, they came, the people from beyond the castle walls. The kingdom had spread so far that many traveled for weeks to arrive. They were set upon by bandits. They struggled, and they suffered, and they fought their way still to the event, because the penalty for not attending was execution._

_From the north, the Witch-King, too, arrived._

_The recent conquest of his lands had been a slaughter. Troops ran wild, burning villages to the ground and trampling the remains. They paid no heed to the traditions of the land, or the old magicks that held it, but from sheer numbers they won the day._

_The Witch-King came to settle the score._

_He joined the line of tribute and mounted the throne room steps in his own time, his black-nailed hands concealed in the sleeves of his robe. He carried with him a gift of death._

_But his hands fell limp when he reached the cradle and saw the infant, his loving parents smiling down at his wide-eyed, wondering face. The Witch-King drew back, torn between the innocent child and the many innocents lost in his own land._

_He raised trembling hands before the throne and spoke his truth. The child would live and grow, becoming renowned for his accomplishments, but for one thing - if he ever laid hand upon a weapon of war, he would fall. He would go down into a deep sleep, and all the castle with him. The curse would hold for a thousand years, and could only be broken by one act - the kiss of someone who loved him, and loved him truly._

_The King and Queen wept at the words, but they called off the guards who swarmed around the Witch-King. Already they realized the danger of allowing weapons near their little son._

_From that day forth, the conquest stopped. The soldiers lay down their swords. The guards snapped their spears. A bonfire was held to consume whatever could be burned, and the rest was locked away or buried or fed to the sea._

_The prince grew into a land of peace. He became a dancer, a musician, a man of letters and gentle, shy smiles, and his people grew peaceful with him, respecting their gentle prince._

_But as the might of the kingdom shrank, their old conquests still lurked in the shadows, thinking only of revenge._

_The prince had barely reached manhood when the invasion began. It came from all borders, and the castle subjects could not stand against it, gone soft in two decades without conflict. Soldiers stormed the once mighty castle walls, and it was all the King and Queen could do to protect their son. They locked him away, at the top of the highest tower, and tried their best to keep the war from touching him._

_The castle fell._

_On the final day of the siege, a single archer climbed the tower and picked the lock on the door. As he took aim, the prince rushed forward, hands outstretched, and the soft skin of his palm touched the tip of the arrow aimed at his throat._

_He fell, asleep. Beneath him, so too the castle subjects dropped where they stood. The King and Queen slumped on their thrones, and the sounds of fighting became a deathly silence._

_So it remains to this day, a kingdom lost forever, undone by the human greed for power and by the sacrifices all of us make for love._

-

Like most children, Victor first heard the story from his mother - the prince, beautiful but doomed, who fell into a magical sleep and took his entire kingdom down too. 

It was meant to be one of those many stories about morality - love, respect, strength, all the traits that a young prince might need to learn if he was to grow into a well-loved ruler, but Victor's imagination flew over the message, rushing onward to magic, mystery, and a Prince, like him but frozen, trapped in a thousand-year sleep.

“Is it a _true_ story?” He prompted his mother, curling his little knees up to tuck under his chin. “Is it really real - the prince and the lost kingdom and the curse?”

“Of course,” his mother said breezily. “The prince will sleep forever, and his people, until the spell can be broken by true love's kiss.” 

Victor was an energetic child - passionate and active, often doing three things at once. His mother thought nothing of the lie. She assumed he would forget the story in a few days, distracted by some new impulse.

That was a mistake. 

For the next several days, the Sleeping Prince snuck into every one of young Victor’s courtyard games. As the heir, he outranked his playmates, and they deferred to his ideas even as children, so they were easily recruited into an infinite number of games of Rescue The Prince, even though Victor was the only one who ever got to play the hero. The lower-ranked children received roles such as “rose bush” and “big rock” for him to overcome. 

And each night, he begged his mother or his nurse to tell him the tale again. Other stories were ignored - a feather pillow clamped tight around his ears to keep the words from leaking in - and they capitulated, waiting for some new idea to catch him, knowing that soon he’d move on.

The games stretched on, though, until the other children left to find better toys and other stories to play out - games where they could have a turn playing hero as well. And the queen tired of telling the story again and again (and being corrected each time she missed a detail), and eventually even the nurse refused to go over it any more. 

“If you want that story so bad,” she finally snapped on her way out of the nursery. “You oughta learn to read and read it yourself.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Victor _did_ know how to read. It had simply never occurred to him before to find the story in the castle library.

Thus began the Reading Phase. Sunlit day or dark of night, the little prince was found curled up in the most comfortable library chairs, digging out any version of the story he could locate and devouring as much as his little brain could comprehend. Some of the books were rich in detail, the story accompanied by fascinating illustrations and illuminations, each rendition a little different. Even when he couldn’t grasp some of the big words, he could look at these pictures for clues, tracing his fingers over the ridges of ink - a tower, a black bird, a blue rose.

The games might have annoyed his playmates, but at least they’d been harmlessly confined to his free hours. The reading, however, took up more of his time. Victor sulked in the library alone with his books, balking at the appearance of his tutors and refusing to attend his lessons. His teachers, outranked, feared laying a hand on the prince without permission and had no power to force him into attending. He ruled like a little tyrant from a moth-eaten throne. 

His behavior finally caught the attention of the castle’s head tutor, Lord Feltsman, who came alone to see what the young prince was doing.

Victor, sitting sideways in his chair with his feet propped up on the arm, noticed the moment he walked through the double doors. “Go away,” he said, imperious in his confidence. “I’m very busy.”

“You certainly are,” Yakov said, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he settled into another chair nearby as Victor watched with narrow eyes. Then, he did something none of the other adults had bothered with - he asked Victor, “What do you like about that story so much?”

“The prince,” Victor answered swiftly. He hesitated when it came to explaining why. The idea was too big. Like the books, it was something he could put together in only fits and starts. He felt kin to the other boy, trapped in his tower, but there was more than that. When he reached for the words, they slipped away from his tongue.

“He’s still sleeping, right?” He asked Yakov as he ran a finger across the illustrations once more, lingering when he found an artist rendition of the prince’s face. Yakov nodded in answer, and it bolstered Victor’s confidence again. “I’m going to save him,” he declared. “Once I’m big enough. I’m going to be the one.”

Yakov, with that special, bitter certainty that adults often have, knew that the story was only a legend. If there was any grain of truth to it, that was long ago obscured by fairy tale. But he nodded along anyway, as if Victor’s conviction made perfect sense.

“Okay,” he said. “You want to find the Sleeping Prince, eh? So then, how will you get there?” Victor’s fingers stopped moving along the page, and his attention turned to his tutor.

The old man continued. “You’ll need to learn to ride, I think. And how will you cut through the thorns that guard the castle? You’ll need to use a sword. You may need to read a map, or plan a strategy of approach. What will you do if the prince speaks another language?”

“I need to learn how to speak his!” Victor proclaimed. There was a light in his eyes as he snapped the book closed and stood from his chair. “What language do you think he speaks? What should I learn first?”

Yakov turned his head so the young prince wouldn’t see his amusement. “Oh, it could be anything. You might need to learn a lot, just to be sure.”

“Then I will,” Victor said, shoulders squared and hands balled into fists, ready to fight whatever battle he must. He marched to the door of the library, leaving his books in a scattered pile, then turned back to see if Yakov was following. “What are you waiting for? We’ll begin now.”

-

Victor chased perfection like a hound with a scent. From a boy who was preoccupied with dreaming, he became devoted to his lessons. On the occasion that his interest flagged, his tutors knew exactly what to say.

 _”Hmm... Do you think this will be good enough to wake the prince?”_

Eventually, even that prod was no longer needed as inspiration morphed to habit, then duty. The years crawled by, trotted, _ran_ , until Victor was fast approaching thirty. Already the most accomplished man in his kingdom - a swordsman, a strategist, a polyglot - he still longed for more. He had surpassed what most of his tutors could provide, and found himself unchallenged.

The messenger boy who raced into the throne room had wild, straw-colored hair and eyes of fierce green, and his urgency broke Victor from the doze he’d fallen into while holding court. The boy didn’t wait to catch his breath, much less follow the formal announcement procedures, but stumbled forward until he was on his knees before the throne. 

“Bandits,” he panted, even as the guards rushed forward to seize him. “In the East. They came from the Old Wood, burned the houses, killed-” His words choked him. 

Victor turned to his mother, needing to hear nothing more. “I’ll go,” he said, rushing on as her lips parted to protest. “None of the other commanders have studied the Wood. None of them have my skill in this.”

The queen pursed her lips, reluctant to allow her sole heir to run into danger, but there was little to argue. She nodded and gave instructions to the guard. Victor would take a small force, leaving as soon as possible and returning just as quickly. 

Victor’s fingers dug into the smooth-worn carvings on the arms of his throne, his heart pounding. He’d never been in the field of battle before, never journeyed so far from home, but he couldn’t allow the opportunity to be hobbled by fear. The excitement and the unknown were certainly worth the risk.

-

The bandits were routed all too easily, and Victor was left forcing a smile as his soldiers celebrated the win. Yes, they had saved some lives. They had done good work. But somehow, Victor had been hoping for something… more.

Still, he let his lieutenants pull him into the celebrations. He drank his liquor and faked his pleasure as the others caroused in the firelight, singing and laughing and wanting little else. He stared down at the plain copper cup in his hands, half-drained. The success fell flat. This was never what he wanted.

What had he wanted again?

Once he was certain no one would notice his absence, he stumbled back to his tent. His bladder nudged him, reminding him of how much he had to drink, so he bypassed his bed to go for a piss in the woods first. 

He wandered in, deeper and deeper, until the sounds of laughter and song faded beneath the chirp of insects. The Old Wood was a no man’s land - unsafe, forgotten. It was so dark and deep that even the bandits, while preying on others’ fear of the Wood, hadn’t dared to camp more than a few steps beyond the tree line. 

Victor knew he shouldn’t venture too far, but the quiet was calling him. 

He found a likely tree and did what he came to do, scanning the forest floor around him absently as he did. Near his foot, something caught his eye - a flat, pale stone, too squared to be carved by nature. He reached for it, only to feel something sting his fingers. He jerked back, then peered at the ground, trying to make out the details through the darkness and the fog of drink.

Words. There were words carved into the stone - old script worn smooth by weather and time so it was no longer readable, and overlain with a twisted brown vine - a vine covered in thorns.

In an instant, the veil of drunkenness fell away. He was too sober and all too alert. He knew it was improbable that he’d stumble across a sign here, and yet-

“Victor! Sire!”

Shit. Someone _had_ noticed his absence. He called out a response and turned back toward the camp, catching himself on a tree trunk as his evening caught up with him again. He made his way back to his tent, stumbling, but his heart was still racing as he stripped off his pants and fell into his cot. 

He wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. He needed to remember. Exactly how far in had he wandered? As soon as it was light, he would get up, and then-

He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

When Victor woke at the first tendrils of dawn, he couldn’t tell what part of the blanket wrapped around his head was sleep and what was the remnants of his drinking. He was struck by the thought that there was something in his dream that he wanted to remember, so he pawed at it, drawing it closer.

 _The stone. The thorns._ He sat up, throwing off the blanket. Had he really seen it? It didn’t feel real, and he hadn’t been sober, but then it couldn’t hurt to check.

He sprang from the bed, dressing with speed. The rest of the camp was still sleeping as he crept out to saddle his horse. Good. That would buy him some time to find out if this was only a hallucination, and to creep back into camp unnoticed if it were.

Though the sun was staining the horizon with rose gold, the Old Wood was dark as midnight still. The ancient trees twisted up around him, their bark a tattered grey and brown piebald, and overhead their branches intertwined in an impenetrable parasol. He rode back in a straight line from his tent, trying to follow his own path and let his horse set the pace, picking the way back carefully to avoid turning an ankle or tripping on a root, while Victor scanned the trunks and stones around them, searching for a hint of anything out of place.

He found himself doubting how far he’d gone as they moved deeper and deeper into the Wood. One man, on foot, and drunk - surely he’d have come across it by now? But the same stubborn streak that had confounded his tutors kept him searching, pressing forward into the deep darkness.

It was the blue that caught his eye - blue as the sea, or the evening sky, the same soft blue as the insignia on his tack. He reined the horse in and slid from the saddle, leading his mount as he went for a closer look. 

A blue rose. There was only one, somehow growing from a tangled old bush out in the middle of the deep woods, with hardly any light to spark it. Its branches grew up in a swirling curve, embracing the shape of the worn stone pillar beneath them. Victor ran his fingers over the soft petals, biting his lip, thinking back on the blue rose in the story book which he’d touched this way so many times. There was no doubting what he’d found. 

He leapt back onto the horse and set out again from there, though not before cutting the rose free, tying it to his sleeve like a jousting favor. 

The path through the Wood was so long disused that what remained of a road was more dangerous than helpful. His horse walked so slowly, avoiding upturned paving stones, crumbling ruins, and thickets of bramble, that it was only just faster than going on foot.

As he rode on, the deep darkness persisted. It was eerie, and it was quiet. The only sounds were the skip of stones beneath his horse’s hooves, cracking twigs, the harsh rasp of his own breath. No birds sang. No creatures rustled through the undergrowth. It was like a dead place.

Dead, or sleeping.

The signs of what was once a habitation grew thicker as he pressed on, along with the thorns. Crumbling walls stood here and there - the remains of a chimney spilling out onto the path to signal where someone’s home once stood. The worn outline of the building now housed only moss, mushrooms, and more roses. 

At last, Victor saw light ahead, opening out into a clearing. The space between the trees widened, and he nudged his horse into a trot, driving for the end. 

After so long in the darkness, the normal morning sunlight burned his eyes, and he shielded his face from the glare as his horse slowed again. When he moved his arm away, he could see the castle.

Its once proud walls were chipped and worn, threaded by thorny vines and carpeted in emerald moss. Beyond the gates, a single tower stuck up from the center of the ruin like a spike, its tiled roof almost completely sloughed off, leaving a gaping black maw at the tip. 

He found no dragons to slay, nor riddles to solve. Not a single living creature appeared to warn or aid him. He had always imagined this moment as being more like the tales, but there was only the silent ruin of the castle compound and its great oak doors.

But the doors were no longer so great as they must have once been. Victor approached them and knocked, knowing no one would answer, and the wood made a hollow sound, bits of it splintering away beneath his knuckles to reveal an inner turmoil of long-abandoned termite trails. He ground-tied his horse a few steps away, then returned and gave the door a swift kick. As expected, it came away beneath his foot in chunks, and with each good kick more fell apart, until he had a hole big enough to pass through - though not big enough for the horse.

Victor ducked inside alone and found himself standing in a large, open area that had once been a central square. The space was dominated by a dry, ruined fountain - the fairy statue at the center having lost one wing as well as a leg. Nearby an old gazebo stood with no roof, and beyond that, piles of rotten wood and tattered, molded fabric that may have once served as a marketplace.

Every surface inside the walls was crawling with thorns, and out in the open, the vines had burst into bloom. It was a chaos of sharp, twisted branches and little flashes of deep blue roses littered among the wreckage. 

The thick vines broke, cracking beneath his boot heels as he tramped through the courtyard, making his way toward the door of the castle itself. He absently scanned the ground around him, still concerned about the possibility of a hidden trap or enchantment.

Arrested mid-step, he suddenly saw it - a hand, fingers outstretched, as if trying to reach through the thorns for the sun. He stopped, shocked.

Buried beneath the roses, the townspeople still dreamed. 

Most versions of the tale said no harm could come to the villagers while they slept, but already he knew the tales weren’t always correct. Stories could change. Writers might lie. He kept his eyes trained on the ground as he continued forward, moving much more slowly as he peered beneath the roses to avoid accidentally stepping on a sleeper.

By the time he reached the rutted stone steps of the castle, the sun was nearly at its zenith overhead. His men would have certainly noticed their prince was missing. Nevertheless, there could be no turning back in the middle of his quest. Something was pulling Victor’s strings, and it was a force beyond duty or obligation. 

The door of the castle hung ajar, one of its hinges broken so it listed at an angle, and it moved away easy beneath his hand. His footsteps echoed hollow on the stone floors as he stepped into the dark entryway. 

Inside, the roses were more sparse and the sleepers more obvious, slumped back against the walls and sprawled out on the floor where they had fallen when the spell hit. He was glad that the castle was dark - the candles unlit, and the windows choked with dirt and vines - because it made it easier to avoid looking at the sleepers. Although he knew what they were, that didn’t make them look any less dead, and their presence made the hairs on the back on his neck stand on end. 

Victor wound his way through halls carpeted with what might have once been blue cloth, but was now grey. Tattered, moth-eaten tapestries, and faded paintings dotted the walls, the faces of long dead nobles watching his passage with hollow, dark eyes. At the end of the hall, he found the narrow, winding stone steps that lead to the top of the tower, knowing that in each version of the tale, this was always the prince’s bedchamber.

His slow ascent gave the story a new, raw reality. Victor’s chambers at home were located near his mother’s, facing out into the gardens. When he woke each morning, it was to sunlight and the busy sounds of servants and family bustling through the halls. Climbing the stairs, he pictured the prince from the story making this exact journey each day, sealed away at the highest point in the castle, alone, for his own protection. 

It would have been a lonely childhood.

The bedroom door hung open on the landing, and Victor stepped forward to peer inside. The roses had conquered the space, spilling blue and green through the windows and the roof to coil across the floor, encircling the sleeper at the center of the room.

Victor’s heart sank. He’d always pictured the prince laid out on a pedestal, peaceful and perfect and waiting to be kissed. Instead, the sleeper was sprawled out on the floor, face down where he’d fallen. There was a four-poster bed at the side of the room, but the roses had long ago claimed it, wrapping it up in their dangerously beautiful embrace.

But, this was where Victor drew the line. He _would_ have his fairytale, just this once. 

He drew his sword and crossed the room, hacking away at the vines that covered the bed. It wasn’t ideal, even without the thorns - the hangings were tattered and rotten, and the mattress smelled of mildewed straw, but it was a bed. The work of reclaiming the furniture left him breathing hard and sweating as the sun streamed through the collapsed roof, but he pulled the last of the branches free, and the bed sat firm, covered in old blankets and a scattering of blue rose petals. 

Satisfied, he returned to lift the sleeping prince. The man hung in his arms - heavy, dead weight, but still warm, still breathing ever so faintly when his head lolled forward and his cheek brushed Victor’s own. It made Victor stop for a moment, holding this stranger tight against himself, a childhood idea made flesh and heat beneath his hands.

He pushed the dream away and continued onward, dragging the prince across the room to deposit him onto the bed, as he’d always imagined. At last, Victor got his first good look at the face of the man he’d always dreamed of, but never known. 

The prince was like an hourglass stopped midway, the curves of his face untouched by time. His cheek was smooth still, and his black hair hung a little shaggy, in need of a trim. Victor brushed the dark strands back from his face. What color would his eyes be? Somehow, in all his imaginings, Victor had never considered the mystery of those eyes. Now, he was looking at the little blue veins in the lids, and it was all he could think about. It seemed so important to know, and all he needed to answer the question was to kiss those petal-soft lips.

Trembling, Victor drew back, trying to make himself wait, to think things through as his tutors had said. His heart fluttered, a small bird beating against a glass cage. Years of study and search at last had lead him to this place, and suddenly he was nervous. It was _true love’s_ kiss that would wake the prince. What if Victor wasn’t the one?

What if he _was_?

He shooed his doubts away, wiping them from his mind like cobwebs from a corner, and leaned back over the bed. After so long, there was no point to hesitation. He would try, and the cards would fall as destiny willed it. 

The prince’s mouth was firm and still beneath his own - warm, but dry. Victor kept his eyes closed, fearing the worst. If nothing happened, what then?

He felt a puff of air against his mouth, and then the prince’s lips were no longer still, no longer dry. Victor collapsed forward, relief and giddy thrill surging through him. He braced himself on the bed as the old frame groaned beneath his weight and opened his eyes. The prince stirred against him, raising a hand, and then sighed again as his eyes opened just a sliver.

Brown. His eyes were a deep, warm brown.

The prince’s brow furrowed, confused and a little unfocused still as Victor pulled away, and then he yelped, shooting up the bed to slam his head into the headboard. The bed, unable to stand such a fuss, dropped beneath them as all four legs gave out at once, and Victor, too, tumbled onto the mattress.

The prince’s eyes were wide now, staring at Victor as he propped himself up on one elbow beside him. Victor couldn’t resist the thrilled grin that pulled his mouth wide. He did it. He _knew_ he would. 

“Good morning, my love,” Victor proclaimed. “Or, afternoon, I suppose.” From beyond the door, there was the clatter and clamor of a great many people. Outside, rough but thrilled voices called out to one another in greeting.

The prince said something, whispering to himself. The language was archaic, a long-disused variation on one of the languages Victor wasn’t entirely fluent in. Through his thick accent, Victor was still able to make sense of the gist of the statement, and his smile stretched. Just as he’d been certain that he was the one to break the curse, so he knew now that, whatever trial still lay ahead, they would overcome it - together.

“Oh no,” the prince had murmured, covering his reddening face with both hands. “He’s too handsome.”


End file.
